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Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Petaluma Camping trip (Part 2)

Napa Valley

On our second day up north we decided to check out Napa Valley. I really had no clue what Napa consisted of, but it’s a valley with 4-5 tiny towns in it. There’s a main road that goes up through the middle of them all and then a “scenic route” road, and we took the scenic route and then drove up through the mountains to check out a lake too.

Understandably, Napa reminded us so much of Italy. There are vineyards everywhere in Italy, so that was probably a big part of it, but also just the flat land with the hills/mountains in the background and how green everything was, even though there wasn’t anything on most of the vines. It was interesting to see how all of the vines were different shapes. I think it would be fun to grow grapes someday, ESPECIALLY if you could do it in this part of the country.

(I took all of these photos out of the moving car, so they aren’t the most clear.)

We drove around this lake and Mark pulled off to the side of the road. Lake Hennessey was pretty and the mountains around it were pretty too. Again, it really reminded me of Italy with the narrow, winding roads.

So we were driving along this mountain and rounded a corner to this view but I didn’t get a good shot of it, so Mark turned around and pulled off on this tiny little driveway. There was another little car parked in the driveway and guy was standing outside of his car with his little point and shoot camera taking pictures. Mark made fun of me when I hoisted up my dSLR with my 70-200mm lens and started taking pictures outside of our car that was probably at least twice the size of his. He still makes me laugh quite a bit, even after 10 years of marriage!

We wanted to stop by one winery while we were in Napa and we chose Castello de Amorosa, which probably was a mistake. This place was neat looking, and again, straight out of Italy, but SO commercialized. They wanted like $29 for KIDS to go on the tour of the place (and it included grape juice) and it was like $49 for adults. Um… No thanks. To put this in perspective, we paid like $40 for all 5 of us to spend the day at Knott’s Berry Farm. To go on a tour of this place it would have been over $150…. I don’t even drink wine. But the place was pretty anway.

Had to get a photo of the iconic Napa sign.

We decided to go to Old Faithful (CA version) while we were in Napa.

This Old Faithful is one of only 3 geysers in the world that regularly erupt. Another is Yellowstone’s Old Faithful and another is somewhere over by Japan – on that side of the world. It goes off about every 10 mins or so. They can actually use this geyser to predict earthquakes in the area. Pretty fascinating stuff. I would have loved to stay and read the info they had longer but Ben pooped his pants…. So we had to go to the car and spend 10 mins and a bag of wipes trying to get him cleaned up. So gross.

These things always remind me of my mom because she loves them and we saw them all over northern CA. So pretty! These ones were HUGE! Like over 6 ft tall!